Near the beginning of the First World War the poet Rupert Brooke wrote:
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!
Rightly or wrongly, with the onset of the First World War Brooke felt the call to an historical duty. That this duty took the form of patriotism and sacrifice in the name of nation-state nationalism we now view with some suspicion, but we have no reason to believe that Brooke’s feelings were anything less than genuine, and his poetry testifies to the sincerity and indeed the nobility of his vision.
Later in the same war Wilfred Owen would write
Dulce et Decorum Est, expressing sentiments in regard to war that are perhaps more familiar to us today. Later yet, in another war, an equally powerful poetic vision was expressed in protest of a war in To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)
by
Adrian Mitchell, which was, in part, not only a response to the war, but also a response to the way in which the war was being reported.
It is easy to imagine that Adrian Mitchell felt called by the urgency of the hour of history no less than Rupert Brooke – both, it seems, had been matched by God to their moment in history – and it is worthwhile to pause for a moment over this particular incarnation of historical destiny, especially as it is to be distinguished from other forms of destiny.
Some individuals have an internal sense of their own destiny that is not a result of historical circumstances. This we could call endogenous destiny, because it comes from within. Such individuals may be thwarted by history in realizing their destiny, or they may find themselves on the crest of a wave of history, carried the more rapidly to fulfillment, but in either case the focus on a particular destiny grows out of the individual’s vision for himself and his place in the world.
Others may be going about life in the customary manner, or perhaps merely drifting aimlessly through life, and an event occurs that calls such men to a destiny they had not previously suspected. This we could call exogenous destiny, as the occasion of the calling to a particular task and a particular form of life originates outside the individual, and might even be said to originate in the accidents of history.
In my own case I can imagine myself caught up in the urgency of the historical hour and called to a task that I had not, until that time, adopted as my own (though I should say that I am old now, and I have not many years left to fulfill any destiny of any kind). Lately I have been reviewing some apocalyptic novels that I enjoyed when I was younger – A Canticle for Leibowitz, On the Beach, Alas, Babylon, The Stand, Lucifer’s Hammer, and so on – and this has put me in a rather apocalyptic frame of mind.
Should a great historical disaster befall my generation, I would immediately take it as my task, perhaps my destiny, to write the history of that historical disaster and so to join in the venerable ranks of historians who have been the voice of their age – Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius – because this is what the hour would demand. Thucydides says something like this right at the beginning of his History of the Peloponnesian War:
“Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world – I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately preceded the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable leads me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a great scale, either in war or in other matters.”
Alarmists might respond that any number of catastrophes of historical dimensions have already befallen us in recent decades, and that, if I fail to see this, it is only because my head is in the sand. To this I can only respond that, if the call should sound, I would recognize it, as certainly as I would recognize my own name when it is spoken. A destiny of this kind is like the relationship one has with one’s own name: it is at the same time both an historical accident and an element of one’s identity as intimately personal as anything that we call our own.